Bongs, buds and beats: A night with Redman at Portland's DOPE Cup

The smoke hits my nose as soon as I turn onto Southeast Yamhill Street on Sunday night for Portland's first DOPE Cup, DOPE magazine's traveling competition and sampling event. As it turns out, the sampling starts in the multi-block line--what better way to pass the time, maaan?--and joint after joint makes its way through the throng, puffs of smoke lifting and lingering in the fading sunlight. "It's (expletive) lit!" a man wearing a tie-died Flatbush Zombies shirt says as a tattoo-covered fellow puts an extremely extravagant fish-shaped glass pipe back into a briefcase.

I'm here to interview Redman, the hip-hop veteran, "How High" actor and longtime marijuana advocate. But first, there's the DOPE Cup: held in Refuge and across the street at Senvoy, it's claustrophobically busy, packed as tight as a fresh bowl and certainly enough for pot paranoia. And yet the mood seems, er, mellow as the attendants survey this brave new legalized world, one that now finds Portland peppered with recreational dispensaries as of just last week.

The DOPE Cup vendors are an encyclopedia of weed: there's cannabis tea from a farm in Bend, fruit gummies and salted caramel chew edibles, volcanoes filling up plastic bags with chemical vapor, blowtorches firing up dabs, gigantic blunts and dainty little joints. There are booths for a marijuana lawyer and a testing lab. Someone takes a superhuman pull on what appears to be a bushel of e-cigs and breathes upward like a Smokey the Bear nightmare. A singer-guitarist is doing a pretty serious take on the "Saturday Night Live" digital short song "Dick in a Box." Oh, it is absolutely lit.

A few hours of turning down free samples later (journalistic ethics!), in the kind of hazy back room I assume all Redman interviews are conducted in, the man himself arrives. I change camera lens and look up to see him working on a joint already: let the record show that even Redman coughs sometimes.

One might think he's busier now with legalization springing up in Oregon, Alaska and Washington, D.C. alongside Washington and Colorado, but it turns out he's been on call.

"When it comes to anything with marijuana movement, they call Red and Meth," he says, referring to Wu-Tang Clan's Method Man, his hip-hop partner in "How High" and a pair of "Blackout!" albums. "Me, Meth, Snoop (Dogg) and B-Real are the forefathers of hip-hop and marijuana. All these events, they try to get us through."

The push toward legalization has come through medical advocacy, not just from blunt-rollers taking two puffs and passing between sides of "Muddy Waters", and the MC says he's done his fair share of research on marijuana's possibilities.

"I'm keen on bringing awareness to the people who don't understand this plant," he said. "I did a course at Oaksterdam University in Oakland, I wanted to study the properties of marijuana, what it actually can do for people... it has over 400 components! And getting high is only one of them.

But he has a show to prep for, and soon he's slipping on gold headphones to go over his set list with his DJ. I make an exit.

Not long after, his DJ primes the crowd to make some noise, then more noise, then, yes, noise once again. He wants to make sure we're ready to party with Redman, who erupts onto the stage with no hint of stoner fog. He debuts his new single, the aptly titled "Dopeman," then takes it back to the '90s: a good decade for Redman and for hip-hop, and he makes its case with heat. There are some in the crowd who clearly remember those days--which is good, because they might not remember tonight. They're high as hell.